“What motivated such people to do their deplorable work? Anger? Certainly. But also the longing for order, a desire to turn the human world into an inorganic one, where everything would function perfectly and work on schedule. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy.” —Milan Kundera, The Farewell Party

It is the month of October. The children are all arms and legs and bloated bellies, dipped in melted chocolate and hardened by the sun. I have become another kind of mineral, a burnt laterite face floating in a sea of black obsidian. I can feel the corrosive elements eating into my bones the way the salt and the sea air have wormed their way into the wood. Millennia could pass before anyone would discover this body.

This small coastal town in Madagascar shows three faces to the ocean. Each spring, the whales make their migratory tract pass the peninsula, breaching their bodies over swells of sea foam. Cargo ships carrying tonnage of Pakistani rice brings the dark faces of men running to the docks. Runnels of grey-green earth flow past the corrugated huts, where the whites of eyes float like miniature moons in the beetle-black darkness.

Two months in this outpost turned into four turned into sixteen. A square root of a life. I look up from my bluff overlooking the sea and hear the roar of the giant flying machines, as the Malagasy sometimes call them, turning their downward trajectory towards the sea-stung airport.

Every day, every month, the earnest scientists from England, the gamin researchers from America, the coarse-talking miners from South Africa, step down onto the runway. Each one speculates on how to pull this place out of the mire and decay. After a few months, they stop speculating, and become merely spectators, plied into their first row seats of a play in which the Malagasy dismantle themselves - only to rebuild their small, clay worlds up again.

On the surface, nothing changes here- the grinning woman who sells blackened fried fish in the market, the gravel-voiced spear seller that scents out tourists on the beach, the tight-waisted fishermen who push the dugouts out from shore. These people have become fixtures here, tenured characters in their own infinite tragedy. I sometimes wonder if I have become one too.

I didn’t use to be like this- so certain of the inviolability of the Malagasy way. Their passive resistance to change, their inscrutable approach to the new, their idle submission to destiny. I didn’t judge, at least not in the beginning. I didn’t keep my distance. Maybe pain and the avoidance of pain does that.

I can recall the first scent I had of Madagascar, that spicy scent of clove and vanilla mixed with the thick sea air – and later, much later – of felled eucalyptus and composting garbage and burnt earth. But with that first breath of arrival I had warmed my bones, set ablaze my cold-country cheeks.

The beginning of a life starts like this. Scents so strong and hues so vivid that they manage to eclipse the past. Crush it like calcified stone. One carves a new face and a new name in the rock, and begins their life again. And as banal as it seemed, Madagascar felt like a fresh dawning. I was deluded of course, and I was vaguely conscious of that delusion. Yet I was certain that I saw a rose instead of a weed, a smile instead of a scowl. I devoured those first subtle effects of sky and earth; put the soft filter on a harsh lens that would otherwise obscure my view.

But before then, before I knew the price of this life, where your one choice excludes all others, I lived in a state of suspended happiness. Bantering with the garrulous taxi-drivers, haggling with women over five cent market greens. Even the music evoked a kind of carefree cadence. It rolled like a long taxi bush ride, where copper-eyed women hummed the hymns of their mothers and their mothers before them. All seemed unadulterated light and color then- pure, untainted topaz and vermilion, setting over a lapis sea. With these pure elements in my hand, there existed a joyful expectation- a tension before the brush is touched to canvas.

Everything on the island was accepted and embraced like a new lover. I rode on the back of trucks down eroded roads through barren desert landscapes. I swam with children on shipwrecked beaches pounded by waves. I shivered under thin, cosseted lambas while squatting women stirred earthen pots of smoking cassava. I patronized local eateries, where insolent young girls spooned out thin goat gruel over red rice.

For the last year, I shared an old Lutheran missionary house in the Antanosy outpost of Fort Dauphin, with a young British development worker by the name of Owen. He had become my confidante and colleague, and occasional sparring partner, debating the pros and cons of development work.

My borrowed time living as a volunteer in Madagascar had come to a crossroads: where I had to decide between continuing work in development or pursuing a more straightforward path –without the fear of disrupting the delicate balance of others’ lives. It was a feeling I had been battling with for a while, feeling purposeful at times, redundant at others.

“You know what your problem is,” Owen said to me one day, biting into a swollen mango, pointing one dripping finger in my direction, “You’re a jack of all trades. You need to specialise if you want a future in development. Otherwise,” he spit out a piece of green skin, “you’ll end up being a master of none.”

I looked up at him, tanned and green-eyed, his pale shirt gathering loose strings at the frayed edges. He sat with his back against the linoleum counter, his frame outlined by the blue bright day outside, all the while speaking with a kind of fatherly affection.

I sat on a chair, my frame swathed in a printed cloth, maroon and golden with the edges framing a Malagasy saying: Mamy ny tantely mamy ny fantianavana. I ran my fingers across the border: Honey is sweet and so is family. Yes, I suppose, through our self-exiled commiseration, we had, in a way, become like family. Two unlikely surrogate siblings, thrown together in a kind of development dystopia, high atop a peninsula in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In the past sixteen months that we had lived together, I had become Owen’s sounding board about duplicitous colleagues and post-colonial bureaucracies. And he had, in turn, become a kind ear, an indispensable friend helping to turn my tides of disillusionment. In short, he was my kindred spirit, floating just like me, working in a region of Madagascar people aptly titled “the graveyard of development projects”.

I was thinking now about Owen’s words. My hand absentmindedly picked up a lychee from a bowl and peeled it - slowly, thoughtfully. A fruit fly rose drunkenly out of the candied bunch, gliding away. The clear juice burst out of its reptilian skin and I caught the flesh between my teeth.

“The other thing is,” Owen said, finishing off his mango with a breezy relish, “you need to figure out what you want to get from being out here.” He threw away the stripped pit and hoisted himself upon the kitchen counter. Reaching for a banana from a hanging basket, he began to peel it pensively. I watched his eyes flash briefly as he punctuated a thought. “A lot of people never really ask themselves that question, you know, looking for all sorts of reasons to justify their existence in this place - in development in general.” He bit into the bruised flesh, “I mean really, what’s keeping you out here? Is it the lifestyle, the weather, the people? Or is it the risk that what you are doing may help or hinder things? ” He tossed the skin into the bin, crossed his arms, and looked at me. “Everyone has similar reasons for coming here, Mei-Ling. But sometimes, people have different reasons for staying.”

Owen’s words carried a weight that heaped heavily onto my own thoughts. Even though I knew he was procrastinating, waxing philosophical while making his way through all my market shopping, I felt suddenly grateful for his company. He was right. I needed to figure out my motivations. I wasn’t quite sure how I ended up in this condition. A bit disillusioned, a bit jaded, tired of all the research students, NGOs, and businesses that traipsed through here taking what they needed and leaving villagers no better off. Sometimes even more resentful or dependent. I was becoming weary of the internal politics, the glad-handing, the competition for funding and projects. The big companies, the small charities, the well-intentioned, but misled individuals. I thought of the semantics of development, the hazy lines and the ingratiating nepotism. In my time out here, I had moved further from what I thought I was, and closer to what I knew I was not.

I sat at the table, mulling over his words, over my memories, staring past him, thoughtfully turning over the ripe, pale fruit between my tongue. Outside, two Malagasy children were climbing a tree, overreaching their tiny brown bodies to snag a giant, bulbous fruit from the top canopy. Their wiry bodies balanced on the branches like acrobats on a high wire.

I had learnt an immense cache of things about development while being a volunteer in Madagascar, and more than that, I had delved more deeply into the fabric of the country itself. I had squatted in huts over open fires, bathed in muddied rivers snaking through sacred forests, roasted zebu meat under southern constellations. I enthusiastically interviewed research expeditions, championed environmental education, crouched under tamarind trees drawing buildings with broken sticks in the dense earth. I wiled away the downtime teaching English to Malagasy guides, whilst cataloguing my abrupt fevers and erupting skin infections. I sank in the soporific state of a place so heat-ridden that you didn’t do anything from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the evening.

I tried to recall my last few months in Madagascar with a kind of traveller’s reverie, wilfully omitting all moments of despair and heartache, and instead called forth striking images of belief and humility. The murmuring talks with the Malagasy over rice tea, riding on oxcarts through acres of Spiny Forest under an opal moon, watching traditional dances of spear and drum silhouetted by a fire. Within this dry, arid region of the south, I was graced for a time to see into the lives of the Antandroy people, or “The People of the Thorns”; a dark-skinned, proud people eking out a frugal living through cattle herding and agriculture, praying for the rain that rarely comes.

Being new and fresh and idealistic to all of this, I began entertaining the fact that I could do this forever. Wrapped in a headscarf, living a simple, Spartan existence, working under the ethos of development. But now I had to take stock, rethink, and try to make sense of everything I had experienced in a place so diametrically opposed to the life I knew. What was I actually doing here, and why did I want to stay? Was my work helping to make anything better, or did it merely aim to serve my own ends? Outside my window, I could see swathes of papaya plantations, and beyond, an escarpment of chaparral and palms, rising up to high mountainous peaks.

I frowned. I knew that I was not seeing the whole picture. There are thousands of trappings that people lay down for themselves. Maybe this was really a fool’s paradise at the edge of the earth, lulling one into a false sense of piety that compels people into purpose. Driven blindly by the idea of development at all costs, truly convincing themselves that positive change and good intentions could equalize the balance and restore world order.

But what I saw over the last year was that money and philanthropy can equal all sorts of things, and imposing an imported model of development does not necessarily guarantee prosperity. No one told any smart director in his breezy office that sometimes people are not quantifiable - not the donors with their bank rolls, not the visitors from Washington with their rented four-wheel drives and their fly-by-night visits, not the ex-pats that learn that their lives really belong somewhere else. Because out here, as in other places where development strives to survive, there is no course you can take that can prepare you for this. There is no module, nor model that can quantify these people of mixed and complicated histories. No theory or study that could ever strive to square this ever-widening circle.

This place, this southernmost tip exiled from mainland Africa, pushed beyond Asia, squatting below the Middle East, tiptoeing over Antarctica, has something important to say, though not in the way that we might say it. It welcomes workers, it patronises visitors, it will give you the tastiest part of a zebu, the highest mound of rice, the softest, newest bread. It is a precious gemstone coveted in the raw. It is an evolutionary anomaly analyzed by scientists. It is the largest island nation on the planet and one of the poorest countries in the world. Despite this, it does not have civil war, a high crime rate, or massive epidemics. But it has a shocking degree of malnutrition, a staggering GNP and a shocking dose of corruption. Its inhabitants speak in dialects rooted in Arabic, Polynesian and Bantu. People still fish in dugout canoes, practice subsistence agriculture, and keep their bank accounts grazing in the pasture. It is an indescribable masterpiece that is unfinished, unrecognised and unappreciated.

As I sat there, contemplating my future, it was not the country itself, its politics or its potential, which caused me pause. I began to believe that why I was staying, or rather, why I could not leave, tethered to this place by some invisible thread, was really because of the people. I began thinking about all of those that I have met - some young, some naïve, buzzing around off the adrenaline of their own convictions. And others too, by years or by experience, full of wisdom and warnings from navigating the treacherous waters of development.

But ultimately, I stayed for the Malagasy themselves. Who remain to this day like untold mysteries, sitting and waiting, amid an endless tangle of thorns.